TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/021389/02138900.070

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 7.5 KB | 146 lines

                                                                                MUSIC, Page 73

Opera Blooms in Brooklyn


A bold new venture begins at a house older than the Met

By Otto Friedrich

    Terrible are the humiliations that Shakespeare inflicts on
the aging Sir John Falstaff. Stuffed into a hamper of dirty
laundry to escape a jealous husband, the portly knight gets
ignominiously flung into the Thames. "Oh, oh, oh," he finally
cries as the supposedly merry wives of Windsor burn him with
their tapers. In setting this black comedy to music, Verdi and
his librettist, Arrigo Boito, degrade the hero still further.
"Lord, make him impotent," the women chorus as everyone flails
and pummels the fallen hero. And yet after his punishment on
the stage of the Brooklyn Academy of Music last week, a
wonderful thing happened. Falstaff mysteriously rose above his
tormentors and soared into space, a paunchy carouser suddenly
transformed into a kind of pagan god of pleasure.

    That was the most remarkable of the many striking effects in
German director Peter Stein's production of Falstaff, with which
the celebrated Welsh National Opera was making its American
debut. But the applause that swept the amiably musty BAM theater
was not just for Stein. Nor just for Donald Maxwell's passionate
performance as Sir John. Nor even just for the smiling Princess
of Wales, Princess Di herself, who appeared in a glowing white
satin dress for the black-tie benefit. Also to be applauded and
celebrated was the start of a new kind of opera season in a
place where opera has been something of a rarity.

    BAM intends to present each year a limited season of varied
and offbeat repertory, using its midsize (2,000 seats) theater
as well as the more intimate (900 seats) Majestic a few blocks
away. BAM officials like to boast that their house has actually
been staging opera since 1861, more than two decades before the
mighty Metropolitan Opera was born. But in fact the whole place
nearly died during the 1950s. Its revival in recent years has
depended heavily on presentations of theater and dance, along
with stagings of operas by contemporary composers like Philip
Glass and John Adams, in its annual Next Wave Festival of
avant-garde work. But BAM is now convinced (perhaps by the
conventionality of many productions at the Met and even at the
New York City Opera) that there are further new ways to be
tried.

    "There is so much interesting opera that could and should
play in a theater of 2,000 seats instead of 4,000," says BAM
opera artistic director Matthew Epstein. "The visual and
musical values are different than in a bigger house, and now
the gigantism of the '70s is turning around. These are troubled
times for the bigger houses in Paris, London, Vienna. Some of
the most exciting work today is being done in smaller theaters
like Cardiff or Brussels. There is less emphasis on superstars
and more on ensemble."

    Cardiff, of course, is where the new Falstaff was born (last
September), after the Welsh National Opera spent years courting
Stein, who made his reputation at Berlin's famous Schaubuhne
theater. Stein saw Falstaff as an intensely personal drama,
clearly sexual and even slightly sadistic. "Hold your paunch,
celebrate it," he instructed Maxwell at one point during
rehearsals. "For Falstaff, it is not grossness, it is
greatness, virility." Bearing out Epstein's point, the modest
dimensions of the BAM theater enabled Stein to stage Verdi's
last masterpiece as a kind of chamber work, with the stage
action fast-moving and intricately choreographed. The closeness
of the proceedings also gives added prominence to Richard
Armstrong's intense and hard-driving conducting of what is
perhaps Verdi's most complex orchestral score.

    BAM officials plan not only to acquire productions from
Europe and from such U.S. opera companies as St. Louis, Chicago
and San Francisco but also to create new stagings of their own
-- and starting in 1991, to collaborate on experimental
productions with the Met. Planned for the first Met-BAM season:
Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice and a new Adams opera based on the
Achille Lauro hijacking.

    For the rest of this season, though, BAM already has two
very unusual projects in the works. The first, at the Majestic
in March, is the Mahagonny Songspiel (1927) by Kurt Weill and
Bertolt Brecht, a small-scale early draft of their corrosive
parable, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. The
eccentric director Peter Sellars has eccentrically decided to
combine this with the same singers performing eight Bach choral
works. But the piece de resistance, which just finished two
weeks of performances in Paris and is due in Brooklyn in May, is
a 313-year-old opera that almost nobody had heard of for the
past couple of centuries. It is Atys by Jean-Baptiste Lully,
court composer to King Louis XIV, and it is a marvel.

    This baroque gem might have remained under its layers of
dust indefinitely except that 1987 marked the 300th anniversary
of Lully's death (of an infection that started after he
accidentally stabbed himself in the foot with the cane he was
using to conduct his music). The anniversary-loving French
authorities decided to join with those in Lully's native Italy
to finance a hearing for the man who is considered the virtual
inventor of French opera.

    That idea led to the cherubic figure of William Christie,
44, a transplanted American with a passion for neglected
composers like Lully. With degrees from both Harvard and Yale,
Christie went to France nearly two decades ago to be a
harpsichordist (he had been a student of Ralph Kirkpatrick),
then founded a flourishing chamber ensemble called Les Arts
Florissants, then became the first American professor at the
Paris Conservatoire.

    Faced with the challenge of how to celebrate Lully, Christie
took the librettos of more than a dozen of the composer's
tragedies lyriques to a house in the country, read through them
all and decided that the most exciting one was Atys. Based on
Ovid, the drama by Philippe Quinault concerns the return to
earth by Cybele, a fertility goddess, for the wedding of King
Celenus. The goddess has fallen in love with the king's friend
Atys, only to find that Atys is secretly in love with the
prospective bride, so she vengefully drives Atys mad. In his
madness, he kills the bride, then recovers, sees what he has
done, and kills himself. Though this is acted out by antique
gods and lords (all costumed in the capes and wigs of the Louis
XIV era), Christie found "the theatrical effect so strong that
an Eskimo could understand what's happening." As for Lully's
elegantly stately music, Christie considers it "wrenchingly
beautiful."

    And so it is, particularly when performed by the young
musicians of Les Arts Florissants, who play Baroque trills on
their lutes and viols with all the enthusiasm that Gunther
Schuller's student band used to bring to Scott Joplin's rags. No
less important is BAM President Harvey Lichtenstein's
recollection of a performance he attended in France: "I watched
Christie conducting in the pit, and the smile never left his
face once."

    Lichtenstein's plans are ambitious, and the big problem, as
always with opera, is money. Falstaff and Atys each cost nearly
$1 million for four performances. But Lichtenstein is a master
fund raiser who has increased BAM's budget more than 15-fold
(to some $11 million this season) during his two decades in
charge. Says he, with a grin: "I am very confident."